Rediscovering Intimacy and Pleasure with Emily Nagoski

I’m so excited to share an encore interview with the brilliant, hilarious, and incredibly insightful Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are, Come Together, and Burnout (co-written with her sister). Emily is a renowned sex educator who brings a blend of scientific rigor and relatable storytelling to the conversation about women's sexual health and pleasure. Get ready for a foxy  (you’ll have to listen to hear why this is literally true!)conversation full of laughter, wisdom, and relatable experiences. Today we talk about her latest book: Come Together (she does come up the most perfect titles!). Note we talk about SEX and get real. So perhaps not an episode with littles in the car unless you want to do a lot of explaining while you listen. 

In this episode we dive deep into:

• High Expectations and Reality Checks: Emily shares the unexpected challenges of writing Come As You Are and the personal journey that inspired Come Together. Discover how stress and exhaustion can impact desire, even for a sex educator.
• The Emotional Floor Plan: Learn about the emotional floor plan concept that Emily developed to understand her journey from stress to pleasure. This framework is a game-changer for navigating intimacy in long-term relationships.
• Say the Words: Emily and Aviva discuss the importance of desensitizing yourself to sexual language. Get ready to laugh and learn as they share exercises for getting comfortable talking about sex – starting with getting comfortable talking about body parts. 
• The Patriarchy and Pleasure: Emily dives into the complex impact of the patriarchy on sexual relationships. Discover how societal norms and expectations shape our desires and how to break free from them.
• Unleashing Your Inner Wild: Aviva and Emily explore how women can reconnect with their deep feminine energy and inner wise woman. Learn about the power of rewilding and embracing your authentic self.
• Navigating Change: Practical tips for couples on how to navigate change and maintain a strong sexual connection. From creating safe conversations to understanding each other’s needs, this segment is packed with actionable advice.
• The Four Questions: Emily shares four essential questions to help couples understand and improve their sexual relationship. These questions are a roadmap to deeper connection and pleasure.
• The Power of Love: Emily’s profound realization about the impermanence of life and the importance of kindness, compassion, and play in relationships. Aviva reflects on her own 40-year marriage and the lessons she’s learned.

We hope this episode helps you feel seen, heard, and empowered. If you enjoy it – and On Health in general – please share this with a friend and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Don’t forget to follow the podcast to be notified of new episodes on the regular.

Resources Mentioned:

• Emily Nagoski’s books: Come As You Are, Come Together, and Burnout (co-written with her sister).

Connect with Us:

• Follow Dr. Aviva Romm on Instagram: @dr.avivaromm
• Aviva’s podcast and articles: AvivaRomm.com
• Sign up for Aviva’s free newsletter for health tips and updates.

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Emily Nagoski: The Interview Transcript

Aviva: All right, you guys, you are here. We are live. And welcome to On Health. A couple of years back, I was joined by the wonderfully informative and clearly hilarious and fantastically able to sing, author of “Come As You Are,” Emily Nagoski. And today we are here for a new conversation. Or I should say Emily is back, and we're going to discuss, among other things, her new book “Come Together.” The woman clearly has the corner on book titles – “Come As You Are,” “Come Together.”

Emily: I was pretty proud of “Come Together” when I thought of that.

Aviva: It's really good. And so we're going to talk about the changes and challenges that arise in the lives of couples in long-term relationships based not just on her vast research and clinical experience but her own sex life and relationship. And since I've been in a marriage for 40 years and it's not fair to just let this be one-sided “come together,” we're going to dish. So sit back and relax or do whatever you're doing and enjoy. And I know you're going to walk away with a whole lot of smiles, I hope, and some really good new information that you can take back home and maybe back to your bedroom or your kitchen counter or wherever you like hanging out. Emily, welcome back. It's so great to have you here. Congrats on your new book. Thank you. Another amazing addition to the compendium of really important books that you write. And oh my gosh, as we're talking, a red fox has just run out from the woods and is sitting in the middle of my driveway scratching itself like a dog. Scratching itself. Oh yeah, yeah, it's so cute. Anyway, okay, we're going to have a foxy conversation. Nature, literally a foxy conversation here. Foxy. Foxy. Okay, so I just want to go right there. What happened in your own relationship between “Come As You Are” and “Come Together” that led you to write this book? There were some things that you talk about publicly that shifted for you guys.

Emily: The problem, honestly, is that I wrote “Come As You Are.”

Aviva: High expectations.

Emily: So a part of the story I don't often tell is that unlike a lot of sex educators, I didn't get into the business because I learned a bunch of stuff about sexuality and realized, oh no, I got lied to about how my sexuality is supposed to work. It actually is this way. I want to tell everyone how it actually is. I read the science and went, oh, everything that I've been taught about who I'm supposed to be as a sexual person and how my sexuality is supposed to work is what has been true for me. But when you look at the science, I'm the oddball. I'm a weirdo.

Aviva: Tell me more.

Emily: I have orgasms from vaginal penetration. That has just always been true for me. I experience spontaneous desire. I don't struggle with arousal, don't struggle with desire until I was writing “Come As You Are.”

Aviva: It's like I was talking with someone recently about having some sleep challenges with menopause, and then I was like, okay, some stuff I'm doing is finally working. And then the minute I said it, I was like, ugh. And then of course…

Emily: What is that universal jinxing thing?

Aviva: Yeah. Some other time maybe tell me that the things that are working, I do the menopause and sleep thing. It is real.

Emily: It is so real. I've never had sleep problems before, but I haven't had all the libido stuff with menopause. The sleep is really… But okay, so you wrote “Come As You Are” and you defied reality.

Emily: I had been married for a year and a half when I started writing or a year and I was… You might think that thinking and reading and talking and writing about sex all day every day is going to be super sexy. It was not. It was just very stressful and exhausting and overwhelming. And despite all this thinking and talking and writing, I lost all interest in actually having any sex.

Aviva: It's like the shoemaker's… What is it? The shoemaker's children.

Emily: Children have no shoes. Yes.

Aviva: Yes.

Emily: The shoemaker is just exhausted.

Aviva: Was it writing about sex or was it writing a book in general?

Emily: Well, it was writing a book and maybe also working a full-time job at the same time.

Aviva: Yeah, that'll do it.

Emily: And maybe also living full-time with my partner for the first time. We did not live together before we got married.

Aviva: So you were having juicy not living together sex. And then you get married and then you're living together and you're working and you're writing a book. And we start to get some of the recipe that is happening for a lot of people in their lives.

Emily: And we got through it. I finished writing the book, things got better. I went on book tour, things got a lot worse. Months at a time. Different people have different ideas of how long is a long time to have a dry spell – months, chunks of months at a time. And I would try to follow my own advice from “Come As You Are,” right? Responsive desire. You put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin. And a lot of the time what happens is your body goes, oh right, this is a really good idea. I really like this person. This was great. We should do this again. And instead what would happen for me is I put my body in my bed, I let my skin touch my partner's skin and I would cry and fall asleep. And the first time I told this story people were like, oh, he must've been so frustrated and so annoyed.

Emily: And I was like, no, it never even occurred to me that he might be because I married the best person on the face of the earth. And so he was only ever patient and understanding and he would bring me tea and he was so kind and generous but I was like, I need more help than I gave in my own book. So I did what any good sex nerd does. I went to Google Scholar and I looked at the peer-reviewed research on couples who sustain a strong sexual connection and people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex lives. And what I learned there made the entire sort of mainstream conversation about sex and long-term relationships totally irrelevant, right? This discourse even among therapists about intimacy – is intimacy the enemy of the erotic and you need distance to keep the spark alive or is intimacy the foundation of the erotic and you need closeness to keep the spark alive? The thing is, couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term don't talk about spark. They don't talk about desire. They don't talk about being horny or wanting each other. They don't talk about spicing things up. They talk about pleasure. They talk about authenticity and vulnerability and empathy. They like the sex that's available to them in their relationship and they collaborate actively to create a context that makes it easy for their brains to get to a place where they can experience pleasure which is a very short summary of three chapters.

Aviva: So, okay, I want to unpack a few things here. One is that it sounds like you were really, really exhausted. And when our bodies are really exhausted, sleep becomes kind of a primary survival thing that overrides reproductive desire. So is there any part of this where it was just like you were just effing exhausted and you needed to rest and you just were fortunate to have a partner and a relationship that supported that and you just needed to rest?

Emily: That was absolutely part of it. I had a lot going for me in this situation. The main thing, apart from having a spectacular human being of a partner, I also am a sex educator. And so I am good at communicating about these things and the sex that we have when we have sex. If I could just get there I knew I would really like it. And there are a lot of couples where they go to a therapist saying they struggle with desire and the thing is they don't like the sex that's available in their relationship and not wanting sex you do not is not a dysfunction.

Aviva: No, that's not a dysfunction. Okay, so let's talk about that. But first let's go back because this is essential. You said something that is really critical. You're a sex educator, you're comfortable talking about sex, you're comfortable talking about body parts, pleasure, orgasm, body juices, all the things.

Emily: I'm comfortable talking about the fact that I like, dear husband, I love the shit out of you and I find you super

sexy and adorable and attractive and I would love to be having sex with you and my body just… I just can't.

Aviva: Yes, exactly. And I have been a midwife for a very long time and a physician, not that all physicians are comfortable talking about sex – we actually know that many are not – but midwives generally are. We're pretty much down with it. And so for me, it's always been something and fortunately my partner is too, we're really comfortable about communicating and saying what we like. We don't like what we need, what we don't want, when we do want, don't want all the things. But that is the exception. We live in a culture where talking about sex is not common. I mean, we know that half of college women in Ivy League schools can't even talk about their… don't know what their body parts are. They as my mom would say, their ass from their elbow but…

Emily: They don't know their vulva from their vagina.

Aviva: They don't. And not only that, we've got the added very real cultural issue that women are very uncomfortable and we're kind of taught to not one, have pleasure, identify with their pleasure or ask for what we want, let alone even know what we want.

Emily: Yeah. How dare we impose?

Aviva: Yes. Or let's help listeners together bridge these gaps of how do you first… I have a course, herbal medicine for women, and one of the lessons is actually because I'm training people to talk to women about sex as part of the stuff that we do, I actually have them stand in a mirror and say vulva, vagina, orgasm, clitoris, clitoris, anus, penis over and over. And until they can say it, actually say it. And then I have them do a list of all the slang words that they've ever heard that any woman might come to them and use that would make them uncomfortable, turn pink, blush, laugh or turn away and make that list and then say those words in the mirror. What is it that you can share to help people, women, get… people, women, get comfortable.

Emily: Women people.

Aviva: Yeah, women people, knowing that I have such a thing in my audience anyway. Women people, people, women, people with vulvas, vaginas, and clitorises get feel, first of all, comfortable using the words to communicate with their partner. And then let's go to how do we know what we want and what we like? Because as you said, there are people who are not wanting to have sex they don't like, but how do they know what they do?

Emily: How do they know what they like?

Aviva: And can you get what you want in a sexual relationship where you're not getting it? Or do you have to leave that relationship? There's a lot there. But let's start with…

Emily: That's a lot.

Aviva: Yeah. Start with talking about it and let's talk about knowing what you want. Then we'll go to the other part.

Emily: So I similarly have a series of exercises that I recommend of just desensitizing yourself to the language. The “Come As You Are” workbook starts with this series of like, I'm going to give you a genital term and you're going to say it back to me as if you're just saying hello to a stranger on the street. Ready?

Aviva: Let's do it. Ready.

Emily: Vagina.

Aviva: Vagina.

Emily: Clitoris.

Aviva: Clitoris.

Emily: Penis. Hello to a stranger. Penis.

Aviva: Hello, stranger. Penis. Penis.

Emily: So imagine now that you see a great friend you haven't seen for 15 years. Miraculously they're just walking down the street and you see them and you're going to say to them, penis.

Aviva: Vagina. I'm just running up to them by jumping around.

Emily: Right. So now imagine you are concluding an interaction with a bank teller. Breast.

Aviva: Thank you so much for giving me that check. Breast, breast, breast.

Emily: Yeah. You are walking up to the checkout person at Target and penis.

Aviva: Oh, let me think. How am I going to do… do I swipe or do I put this in? Penis. Yeah.

Emily: Does this have tap to pay? Scrotum.

Aviva: That is such an unpleasant word, don't you think? Scrotum?

Emily: I kind of like the word scrotum. I especially like the phrase raphe which is the seam down the center of it. Yeah.

Aviva: I was reading a book, some cheesy novel recently, and the woman is like, he is such a scro, talking about the man who left her for another woman and screwed her out of all our money. He is such a scro. And I was like, the Brits have such great ways of coming up with terms. Yes. Okay, this is great. I love this.

Emily: So saying the words, making lists of the words and just saying them over and over and over again. When it comes to talking with your partner about what you want or let's imagine a world where you do know what you want and you are one of the many, many people who finds it easier to have sex with a person than you do to talk about sex with that same person. There are two very typical barriers that prevent people from talking about it. One is they're afraid that they're going to describe something that they want or… and their partner is going to never be able to look at them the same way again. They're just going to be shocked and horrified. And the second is that they're afraid they're going to say something that will inadvertently or understandably if you're going to say something, I have never liked the sex that we've ever had and I've been faking it this whole time, you could be hurting your partner's feelings.

Emily: And the goal with a conversation like this is to be an invitation for more closeness, to be more collaborative in creating a sexual experience that both of you really like. So I am a big fan of the meta conversation. Have a conversation about the conversation. So we have sex and we don't talk about sex and I feel uncomfortable even just saying that sentence to you. So I was wondering if there might be a time when we could not talk about sex. I am not ready for that, but could we talk about the things I'm worried about when I think about possibly talking to you about sex set up? What are the things you're afraid might happen? Is there a nest you can build or a safety net that you can build in a pre-conversation so that when you have the conversation and somebody does have a hurt feeling or somebody does feel shocked you have a strategy in place.

Emily: You've decided that if somebody has a big emotional response, we're going to take a pause, we're going to take a deep breath, we're going to crack a joke, we're going to watch a YouTube video of cats, anything to sort of de-escalate the emotional activation…

Aviva: Foxes. Watch the foxes in your driveway.

Emily: Whatever you've got access to. We're going to play tug with the dogs, but you build a structure so that you can have access to the conversation in a way that feels safe and you're not going to drop down an eternal hole into an abyss of isolation because you are a freaky, geeky sexual person who doesn't belong in the human community. You know what I mean?

Aviva: Yes.

Emily: That's the root of that fear is that I am a shameful, isolated, disgusting person who doesn't belong in the human community. And I can't talk about these things with my partner. If this is my nesting partner, my whole life depends on them being okay with me.

Aviva: It's so interesting. I mean, I've been in a 40-plus year relationship, 40 years this year since we're married and we've really grown together over time. But naturally as we grow and evolve all kinds of things change. But also if you got together with someone 20 or 30 years ago, things that you might not have thought you liked or even have heard about at the beginning or thought were possible for you or your body's changed and you want different new things now may be part of your lexicon of need and your partner hasn't changed in that same way. Maybe they don't have that same need. So it can seem like you've outgrown your partner. I hear a lot of women saying, yeah, we've kind of grown apart sexually and I want these things and I'm becoming more open and more liberated and I'm exploring my body and my partner… How do you bridge that gap as in that conversation?

Emily: There's a whole chapter on change. Conversations change that you want to create intentionally and the change that you end up being required to deal with because of circumstance. This is basic public health 101. When you would like to encourage someone to change, remember that it took you time to progress to the point that you're at now. A lot of us bring the idea that, okay, so I am definitely right. All I have to do is convince my partner that I am and we're going to have one conversation and they're going to flip a switch and then tomorrow they will 100% agree with me and act the same way. And that is not how change happens. It's not how you changed. So of course it's not how they're going to change either. They're going to go through a series of progressions. They might be in my favorite stage of change, pre-contemplation, where they're not even thinking about change.

Emily: Almost all of us are in this about almost all of the health behaviors that we engage in all

the time. We're not even thinking about it. Our lives are complicated and busy and change is hard. In the book there are specific kinds of conversation prompts that can be most effective when a person isn't even thinking about it and may even have some defensiveness about that. If I know if it didn't bother me the way it bothers me, I wouldn't want to think about change either. But is there any part of this situation that actually does bother you in order to increase the salience of the problems that are happening right now? Those kinds of conversations your partner may be. And the goal with any change process is not to get them from where they are to change. It is to get them from where they are to one step further along this gradual progression of the stages of change. They might be in contemplation where they're thinking about it too. And there you want to amplify the ambivalence they've got because we all have. There's always good things about change and there's always not so good things about change.

Aviva: But I like it the way it is. Why do I have to change it? It's good how it is and then the other person's going, isn't it really?

Emily: Yeah. So if that's the case, so that person is pre-contemplation, things are fine the way they are. And person B is bringing a problem and saying things aren't fine the way they are. So even just the act of getting person A empathically to reflect, I feel like things are fine the way they are and you feel like things aren't fine the way they are and your needs matter to me. And so I want to be here for you.

Aviva: I also find too that when I talk with my patients and I want to go to this place of women in menopause and middle age, don't love that term, need to find a better term, but in those years, many are actually pleasantly surprised that their partners, particularly long-term partners or new partners of a second marriage for whatever reason, I think are actually excited about something new. You get to a certain point and novelty doesn't happen as often as it did unless you have a life that somehow magically creates that more frequently. And so I find that when my patients, the women I work with become empowered, one, to identify what it is that they feel like something's missing. And sometimes that thing is actually the intimacy part of the sex or not having things be so routine. And then they get comfortable asking or talking or really expressing that desire. Often their partners are really receptive and are like, oh, huh, didn't realize we weren't talking about this. But yeah. Cool. Okay. Do you find that too?

Emily: In heterosexual relationships? I mean, there's only two ideas in the book that were so complicated that they each required two chapters. One is the emotional floor plan and the other one is the patriarchy. And the reason I took two chapters for the patriarchy is that there's a sort of patriarchy for everybody chapter because all of us are in it and all of us have absorbed these messages. And then there's a specific chapter for couples in heterosexual relationships, whether the people identify as heterosexual or not, you're in this dynamic where one person was raised with one set of rules, the other person was raised with another deeply contradictory set of rules. And if you each try to play this game by your separate set of rules, there is no win. It's impossible to win. But I do find that men in these situations, we tend not to give 'em enough credit for being flexible and adaptable and responsive around requests for change around sexuality. And along with that, they also stay attracted to their partner in ways that a lot of women are really afraid. With the changes that happen around middle age, we worry that our partners will no longer be attracted to us and the typical…

Aviva: As if they're not changing too.

Emily: As if they're not changing too. And certainly there are people who particularly if when they got together with their partner, their partner conformed to the culturally constructed aspirational ideal and they sort of felt like their partner's attractiveness to other people was a way that they could know that they're a worthy person. If their partner loses that being attractive to other people, then you lose your sense of worthiness.

Aviva: Oh, interesting. Your partner's looks as social validation.

Emily: Absolutely. I mean, that's why it's a trophy wife, right?

Aviva: Yeah. So…

Emily: Those people exist. I have met them and I have had successful conversations where it clicks for them where I'm like, you married this person. What does “till death do us part” mean to you? Did you think her body would stay exactly the same, especially because you knew ahead of time you wanted kids?

Aviva: But isn't that the thing about aging? I mean, I'm 57 as we speak and I have worked in women's health for 40 years. I have worked with women in all sizes, shapes, and ages of bodies. But it wasn't until I started actually aging more visibly to myself that I actually was like, oh, this is happening to me too. Somehow I had this idea, it's like when you're a teenager and you think you can't get injured jumping off of something tall or riding a motorcycle really fast or labor contractions. It's like you can tell someone about 'em until they experience. I don't know. There's something about it that's kind of nuanced that maybe we don't actually, we intellectually know we're going to get older with our partner, but we don't actually know what that feels like until it's happening and all of the…

Emily: Yeah, but then we recognize it's happening and what do we do? Do we go, oh fuck, no, I'm not interested in that. Or do we go, oh, it's happening. Crap. Cool. How neat. I get to watch this happen to my partner and my partner gets to witness this happening to me.

Aviva: Absolutely. You have to approach it that way to get through it and support each other and…

Emily: Curiosity, compassion, and kindness.

Aviva: Yes. And it's funny when I see my 12-year-old best friend, she's not 12 now. We were 12 together. I do have a 12-year-old best friend and that's my oldest grandchild. But my 12-year-old childhood friend, I look at her and we've known each other all these years. And when I see her eyes, I still see the 12-year-old. It's the weirdest thing. And how can we actually remember that with our partners too? How can we see that essence? I saw this… it was an Instagram thing or something where it was like this couple who were clearly well into their eighties and they're holding hands about to cross the street. They're on the edge of a sidewalk and there's a brick wall behind them and they're hunched over and he's wearing a raincoat and a hat and he has a cane and she's a little hunched over and they're holding hands. But on the wall behind them is this couple, it's the shadow silhouette of this couple dancing. It was so beautiful. And I'm like, how do we hold on to the essence of who we are? So we earlier touched on couples who go to therapy and they're like, but I actually don't like the sex I'm having in this relationship. That's huge.

Emily: And that conversation might start with, I used to be interested in having sex, but I'm sorry, this hurts my partner's feelings, but I'd be fine if we never had sex again.

Aviva: Well, in my experience, I'm going to say as a physician, I'm shocked because I think, mean, look, there's always that sexual desire and libido and sexual interest shows up from people who are asexual to people who are like, I got to do this every… twice a day, right? There's no right, there's no wrong. And also I do see some elements of sex drive as related to our physical wellbeing. There are lots of medical conditions, for example, that can cause diminished libido, lots of medications that can cause diminished libido. So I'm also looking out for that, not just assuming it's like human variation or fatigue or whatever. So how much of this, because we're talking about long-term relationships here, how much of what we're seeing is happening as a function of getting older together in a relationship and changes in that, what I thought I liked, I didn't like, I've never liked this and I just can't suck it up anymore. Or how much of that is menopause for the female part of the partner?

Emily: If you know of research that indicates a specific hormonal situation that alters the central functioning of sexual response, tell me about it.

Aviva: I know that when women have low thyroid function, for example, that absolutely affects their libido. When women are experiencing hot flashes and not sleeping well and are really going through a much more difficult self-concept shift in menopause, that can affect their libido. Vaginal dryness can affect their libido. So the things that are happening…

Emily: Estradiol for the win.

Aviva: It's like, man, you don't even know what you lost until you lost it with that hormone.

Emily: My gynecologist spontaneously said, wow, your vaginal rugae have really flattened out.

Aviva: Mean like bye-bye rugae. And then she prescribed me estradiol and things are good now.

Emily: Good.

Aviva: And you can use hyaluronic acid. There are all kinds of things that can…

Emily: Hyaluronic acid cannot hold a candle to estradiol.

Aviva: It didn't work for you as well?

Emily: I mean, it was fine. The hormones made it juicy again. And everybody's different. I know everybody needs different things.

Aviva: Okay, so back to the question, is

it which are the physical changes things and which are the, I've actually never liked having sex with you, but we're married. What are we going to do about this? How do we find pleasure or do we just check out at this and say this was not working ever?

Emily: To the best of my knowledge, apart from the genitourinary changes that happen in particular with the drop in estrogen, and so the tissue becomes fragile, which can result in pain. And if sex is painful, again, it's not a dysfunction not to want sex you do not. And if you know it's going to be painful and you start to dread it, so of course desire is going to decrease. But I want to point out that we're using a whole lot of language and getting it confused because you're talking about sexual drive, sexual motivation, sexual interest on the one hand, and then you're also talking about pleasure, liking the sex, having it feel good. One of those is fundamental and essential. And the other one is pretty much beside the point. Because if you like the sex you are having, you'll be motivated to have more of it. And there is no amount of wanting to have sex that's going to make the sex in your relationship worth the time and energy that it takes if you don't like it.

Aviva: Alright, so for women who are listening who are going, okay, yeah, let's get real. I don't like it. Let's help them figure out what is going on there. Talk more about the different ways that women aren't liking it. Is it technique?

Emily: Oh gosh. I mean, especially if it's been a while in a relationship. So women have been trained from early on on the day you're born, adults look at your genitals and they declare, it's a boy or it's a girl. Or if it's an intersex child, let's leave aside the example of intersex kids. It's a boy or it's a girl. And they give you this user's manual of how you're supposed to use this body, who you're supposed to love, how you're supposed to love, who you're supposed to be as a sexual person. And if you get the, it's a girl manual, then you're taught that your pleasure really doesn't matter. You're supposed to be a giver, pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others at all times. So when you have a partner, whoever they are, and they're doing whatever they're doing, and they say, do you like that? What's the only possible answer? As a giver, pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others.

Aviva: Breast, penis.

Emily: I like it. I like it because your pleasure matters so much less than your partner's feelings. And a lot of people get to sexual adulthood not even being really confident at what sexual pleasure feels like in their bodies. Because when they're in sexual scenarios with a partner, all their attention is shifted onto like, is my partner satisfied? Are my partner's needs being met? Are they judging things that are… you're monitoring your body rather than paying attention to the sensations that are happening inside your body. So if you perform the sexuality you think your partner wants you to be experiencing, then years go by and you continue to perform that sexuality. And you have never been your full sexual self. You may never even have met your full sexual self.

Aviva: So let's talk about how you can meet her. I am really spending a lot of time exploring this sort of, for lack of a better term, deep feminine connection and inner wise woman and inner knowing and this kind of sense of rewilding. How do we as women, and for me, how do I as women, but also how am I communicating this to my patients? Really go deep into unleashing those parts of ourselves that we hold back and it's so many women are like, this is how I should dress. This is how I should talk. This is what I should be into. I had a talk I gave really randomly. It was at a restaurant that was one of David Bouley's, he just passed away, his restaurants. And I was talking about food as medicine and this woman was sitting in the front row and I honestly never seen a woman who was just quite so embodied and just comfortable in her skin.

Aviva: There was something about her that she exuded. And I went up and started chatting with her after. And it turned out she was a professional dominatrix. And what she did with her work was helping people unleash their repressed power and confidence and desire. And I'm really curious about this and I'm so curious to hear your feelings about it and how you think this plays into this kind of playing small, this playing the good girl and all these roles that we're cast into which fortunately my mom didn't give to me but I also still find that there are new layers of my own self. Actually as a professional, as a physician, I sometimes feel like there's a certain way I should be to be respectable or trusted.

Emily: Well, absolutely.

Aviva: Yeah. So how do we do this? How do we really get a little wild if you will?

Emily: The narrative in my mind when you talk about a dominatrix, I'm reminded of the ways that women have been taught that they're not allowed to want things. A heroine in a novel is not allowed to want the big fancy wedding where she gets to be the center of attention and wear a beautiful dress. So her family members force it on her and thus so she gets the thing that a lot of people secretly really want but don't think that they're allowed to say that they want. In romance novels in the seventies, trigger warning for the next 30 seconds, in romance novels in the seventies, always every time the first time the heroine and hero have sex, the hero rapes the heroine because she is at the seventies. Reader cannot like a heroine who wants sex not until she is forced to have the sex. And it turns out she likes it is she allowed to want it. And of course, then she becomes insatiable. And yet it is a narrative that we see play out in the fucking Twilight books.

Aviva: Oh yeah, I know. I remember reading those with my girls when they were teenagers. First of all, I read one on a camping trip and I could not go out to pee by myself because I was so scared. This is ridiculous. But it was terrifying. But yes, that narrative is so… I mean, she literally gives up her life.

Emily: Bella's not like the other girls. She doesn't want all those things. We like her because she doesn't want those things but she gets them. And we as the readers get to vicariously have the things that we also are not allowed to acknowledge that we want. You go to a dominatrix and she says, I require you to masturbate to the edge of orgasm. I require you to stop now. I require you to stay. I insist that you stay at a peak of pleasure.

Aviva: And this woman was really, from what I could get from her, not even really doing sexual work or sexual play. It was really more about learning how to dress in a way for women. So dressing as a dominatrix in her worldview of what that is or the woman's worldview and assuming this role of power that one could express not simply in the bedroom or on your heated bathroom floor but in the boardroom, in the negotiation, in the difficult conversation. So there's so many ways that we don't actually ask for what we want. So how can women who have either never really explored or experienced pleasure or who are going, I'm not quite liking what I'm getting and I want to get something different, explore that for themselves and understand how to find pleasure and have permission to have wants. I think that's even a bigger question. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on.

Emily: It might be possible to get there without touching your own body but I'm not sure where you would start if you didn't start with touching your own body. And I don't necessarily mean your genitals. I mean take 30 minutes with the door closed alone naked and you can do it standing up in front of a mirror. You can do it lying down in bed. You can do it lying on your heated bathroom floor. But touch parts of your body with other parts of your body and notice what those sensations feel like. Explore which of those sensations your brain is interested in interpreting as pleasurable and which of those sensations your brain goes, I'm not sure about that one. Especially pausing. Go really slow around the edges of the sensations where your brain's like, I don't know. I don't know. The skin has many, many different kinds of… I'm not saying this because you don't know but light touch just like brushing, whisper, just the displacement of a hair follicle you can receive that sensation. Deeper touch, pressure.

Aviva: And do you know what? I am someone who light touch sends me off the roof. It's like light touch for me is like scratching fingernails on a chalkboard. I'm like, don't do light touch. It's so interesting, right? Don't do light touch.

Emily: Exactly. So what a fascinating exploration. You'd be like light touch, you'd be like, I'm going to just bypass right over light touch and go right to…

Aviva: No, it actually makes me just want to… even a massage therapist, I'm just like…

Emily: Deep touch where you are displacing the fascia and the muscle tissue where you're stretching the deep tendons, vibration sensations, all the different kinds of nerve endings that we have in our peripheral nervous system to perceive sensation. All of the rest of our extra receptive senses too. What does the room smell like? What is the light in the room? How does the inside of your own mouth taste? You can do mindful eating but getting to know the sensations of your body everywhere is the first place to start. And the only way you're going to create 30 minutes to explore where pleasure lives in your body and what it feels like is if you decide that pleasure matters more than all of the zillion other things you could be doing with that 30 minutes. So what are you willing to cut from your schedule and replace with this?

Aviva: What are your thoughts on this? This is something that actually my partner and I have really been exploring, and we've kind of always been there, but it's been a new level, especially with me having this sleep problem, which is definitely like I just want to go to bed when I can and please don't wake me up. Is the act of giving pleasure in itself or receiving non-sexual pleasure leading to sexual pleasure? So I have found for me, for example, the act of my partner giving me a massage in just a very like I'm here to help your body feel good and relax. And I know you haven't been sleeping in and of itself leading to pleasure or me doing something for my husband, my partner basically actually leading to me feeling more desire, if you will, to be engaged. Sometimes the giving part can be surprisingly stimulating.

Emily: And this brings us to the emotional floor plan, which is, I mean, this is the thing that did it for me. Again, I didn't have a pleasure problem. I liked the sex that we had. I wanted to have it and I could not get there. And it was actually the father of affective neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp, who offered me a framework for understanding this. And I superimposed a silly metaphor to make it more applicable. And the metaphor is that our seven primary process emotions, which are the universal mammalian emotions, are like spaces in a house. So we can map an emotional floor plan, and one of those spaces is lust. So when we're mapping the floor plan in order to find our way to erotic sexual pleasure, we want to find our way to the lust space. And some of these primary process emotions are pleasure favorable, and some of them are pleasure adverse.

The pleasure adverse ones are real simple because they're the stress response: fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn. So there's the fight space, which is rage, everything from irritation and annoyance, frustration all the way up into rage. And then there's flight, which is everything from slight worry all the way up through terror. This is the space that I was in when I was working a full-time job and writing a book for the first time and newlywed and feeling very self-critical. I was in the fear space, just bouncing around in that fear space. So when my partner touched my body, my brain wasn't in the lust space to interpret that sensation as sexy. It was in the fear space. And so, of course, it wasn't. And then the third pleasure adverse space is panic grief, which we talk about less as a culture, but this is isolation. Depression lives here, a feeling of worthlessness, hopelessness, shame lives in panic grief. Those are all secondary process emotions that live in the panic grief space.

And none of them are adjacent to the lust space. But what I hear you talking about is the care space, and specifically so care is huge in the human brain in particular because we're not just mammals, we're these ultra mammals that have enormously dependent offspring for so long. And so our attachment system is vast. So the care space, which is one of the pleasure favorable spaces, is just enormous and it has a lot of different personalities and can be complicated. But you are talking about this caring for each other, giving because you are motivated by a desire for connection with this person because you like them and you want to give to them. And so you do things in the care space, and as you are caring for each other in the care space, it turns out you're in the living room of care in your emotional floor plan. And it turns out this couch folds out into a bed, it goes immediately to the lust space. My brain does not work like that. There is not a direct path from the care space to the lust space in my brain. I'm just different. What's connected to it? For play. Play is the universal mammalian system of friendship. Play is any behavior we engage in for its own sake because everybody likes it and you have nothing at stake. You've got nothing to lose.

Aviva: So you love strip poker. No, I'm just kidding.

Emily: I mean, I played strip poker.

Aviva: What I like is for there to be no performance demand or expectation. So object play, children object play. Like little kids, at first, they're just sort of figuring out what the water in the bathtub is like, what is going on with this? And eventually they're like, oh hey, what can I make this do? What can I make? Can I splash? You can splash you. That's object play. They're figuring out what they can make things do. And why wouldn't my partner's genitals be a target of object play? Like, what can I make this do? What does it feel good to me when I do? What does it feel good to you when I do? So it doesn't matter how their genitals behave or what their blood flow is doing. I want to know, is this fun for you? Do you like it?

Emily: It is. So curiosity is in fact the last pleasure favorable space. It's seeking, it's exploration, it's adventure, it is novelty, which for some people is really good and for other people isn't so much. But that curiosity is foundational to all of the problem solving we're ever going to do around sexuality. And I mean, when I was in grad school, I dated other grad students, and we spent most of our time talking about each other's research. So for me, there's a water slide from talking about affective neuroscience into the lust space.

Aviva: I find that certain intellectual conversations actually are that water slide for me too. I actually really appreciate certain aspects of conversation and what people are interested in and what my partner's interested in. It's like animal cognition.

Emily: Yeah, it's fascinating. All right, so we got a couple. Let's say you guys actually, let's go back to you guys. You were in a drought. What can couples do?

Emily: Here's what we did. So I figured out this floor plan thing and I was like…

Aviva: Okay, well first, when you say here's what we did, were you guys both okay, we have an issue here? Or was it like you going, hey, we have an issue here?

Emily: I started out in individual therapy, talking to my own therapist about it. I wanted to make sure I had language to bring to my partner that wasn't going to make him feel bad.

Aviva: Lovely. I love that. Okay. And so now back to your emotional floor plan. Sorry, I just wanted to get that clear.

Emily: So what I realized is that I was following my own advice of putting my body in the bed, but when I was letting my skin touch my partner's skin, I wasn't in the lust space. So my brain wasn't interpreting sensations as being sexy. It was interpreting sensations through the lens of like, I am afraid, I am running. And when my skin touched my partner's skin, my brain went, oh, I'm safe now because here's my person, here's my favorite person, and I'm safe now and I can complete the stress response cycle. I can release all of this stuff I've been holding onto. And that comes out for me in the form of tears. So it's a really deep, intimate, profound thing that would happen. And I just was not aware of how extremely stressed out I was. So I complete the stress response cycle. My body is now relaxed. Where am I now? Can I get into the lust space now? No, I am physically exhausted. I need to care for my body and be well enough and probably have a snack and probably take a bath. And then I am well enough to find my way either to the seeking space or the play space. And from there, it's an easy wander into the lust space.

Aviva: And this is a big one. A lot of new moms, for example, or moms in general find themselves in that chronically depleted, I don't feel like having sex, I'm just actually touched out and depleted space. So this is really important. Put a pin in this. We have to take care of ourselves.

Emily: And this is a giant example of how giving can be powerful because a depleted mom needs more help. And if her partner is like, boy, I do sure wish we were having more sex, your partner needs more help. I'm not saying help your partner in exchange for sex. I'm saying help your partner because your partner is depleted and needs more help and nothing else is going to happen until enough help is given.

Aviva: Oh yes, that is Instagram. Nothing else is going to happen until more help is given.

Emily: And receiving the help, not only is receiving the help, but is also receiving the emotional support because, oh, my partner noticed what I needed and did it without me having

to instruct them on how to do it.

Aviva: Well, I think that's why the massage for me is the turn on. It's like, not only am I going through releasing my own stress cycle intention, it's that he actually is taking the time to nourish me and that I really needed. And we bought these beautiful, they're these massage stones. They're just these round bricks of coconut oil basically and cocoa butter…

Emily: And they melt.

Aviva: Yeah. And it's really nice. So it's just this smooth, deep sensation that I find like, oh, thank you for touching me in a caring way that's just giving. And now my body can, my mind can relax, my body can relax, and I feel so appreciative and connected. And this was actually really sexy too. Yeah.

Emily: And how great that deep touch feels good and that he can just bypass light touch.

Aviva: Oh yeah, please do not do that. If someone skipped light touch for me, not only would I be missing out, but they would be missing out on a lot of the good things that happened for me from light touch. Nervous system is different. So you go to your therapist, you're like, identify this, that you want to work on this. You get nourished, you start getting nourished, and you're resetting this emotional floor plan.

Emily: I stopped beating myself. I thought that my care space was supposed to have a pathway directly into lust, and it doesn't for whatever reason, maybe because I'm a fucked up family of origin, maybe because I'm autistic, that is also a possibility. I don't know.

Aviva: And we're also just really, really different. We're all wired so differently. Yes.

Emily: People just vary. So I stopped beating myself up and being like, it should happen. I stopped shooting on myself and I just figured out, oh, these are the spaces. And I could go to my partner and say, remember the times when it's been easy for me to get to experience pleasure? There are times when we're laughing, when we're playing games, when we're making jokes, when we're recognizing how darn silly sex can be. The play space is the place I need to get to in order to make this easy. And my life is such that I spent a lot of it in the fear space. That is my nervous system and that is my life. And so in the fear space, that's your brain noticing a potential threat and interpreting it as your best chance of survival is to escape, is to run just as fast as you can, just run. So I'm like running for years. For 40 years I ran biologically. The rage space is your brain noticing a potential threat and interpreting it as your best chance of survival is to destroy it. We can agree that if your brain state is noticing your partner as a potential stressor that it can cope with best by destroying it, that's not a time to be engaging sexually with that person, right?

Aviva: No. Or if you feel afraid either. Right.

Emily: Fortunately, Rich has never ever been the stressor. But what this meant for me is that I needed to learn when I mapped out my floor plan and I saw the path I had to travel in my emotional brain in order to get to the lust space, I was like, oh, this is why all the people who want it to be spontaneous and natural and easy. And if it doesn't just happen out of the blue, then my partner doesn't want me enough. That's all bananas. My partner is super de sexy and I want to be ready to go all the time and the reality of my brain and my life until we can change my life such that I don't have to be in that state all the time, it's just always going to take 20 to 60 minutes for me to transition out of my mundane state of mind into “Hey sexy lady.”

Aviva: This is an interesting point you bring up because one of the things that my husband and I work together from home we have for years and us too. So for me the sleep thing isn't really so much about the hormones it's that too. But there have been some pressures external pressures internal pressures life reevaluation things that I've been going through and just a lot of work a lot of moving parts.

Emily: For me it's the progesterone just for the record there's also a hormonal shift.

Aviva: That does definitely do it but there's been a lot of stuff. But then that I think for me what it is is the hormonal stuff and the sleep makes it harder to be resilient. One of the things that I it is funny. Recently I was like we should just have sex every day just to see what happens. Just take get back in the flow. Please don't do that. We're still pretty well just kind of kidding was like my thought was just to get back in the flow of point being not using our bedroom as a place where we have business meetings because what I've been stressed about is work and financial stuff. And so if that's top of mind when I wake up in the night and then we wake up in the morning and we're feeling like it's really sweet between us but then my stress response starts bubbling up and then I'm like I start talking about work or I start talking about my fears. That just kills it. So that's that 20 or 30 minutes to get out of your fear space. It is for me it's learning to I don't have to talk about that right now right here because this is not juicy for us and it kind of creates stress in the bedroom.

Emily: Yeah. That's a mindfulness practice. Noticing that those worries are creeping in when you're like hello I can have you thoughts anytime. I'm going to return my attention right now to the nice warm sweet things that are happening.

Aviva: Yeah. I've even started this little mantra. I actually deserve to sleep well. I actually deserve to have pleasure right now and sorry worries. You can come back another day or not.

Aviva: Let's get granular as we're rounding this up. So we've got couples who are going through whatever mismatches in their desire issues with their pleasure. Women who are stressed out and exhausted and they're going through menopause or perimenopause or their moms or whatever the droughts right? Whatever the reasons for the droughts. Let's look at the let's say five steps that you can take to figure out your emotional floor. What would they be? Figure out your emotional floor plan. Find your pleasure find what works for your body. Let let's leave everyone at the top of the hour with where do you go from here? If you're experiencing any of these things we've talked about that are keeping you from having the sex you want or the pleasure you want with the frequency you want with the sense of connection intimacy all the things.

Emily: I was going to break it down in two ways but now I'm going to break it down in three ways. First thing fuck frequency. It is not about how often you have sex. People ask me about frequency all the time. I want you to imagine a couple that has sex. I had a frequency that feels high for you. You're like oh I have sex at a pretty right. It is quite frequent sex but at least one of them does not like any of it. Versus a couple that has sex at a frequency where you're like wow that's really not very frequent. But they both just love it every time it happens. Frequency is not the thing pleasure is the thing. So the thing to bear in mind is that the image we have in our minds of what sex in a long-term relationship is supposed to look like is a hundred percent wrong.

Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long-term have three things in common and they are not frequency or desire. They are one, they're friends who trust and admire each other. Yes, I am radically suggesting that it is more important that you really like your partner than that you really want your partner. You need a baseline attraction. But apart from that being great partners, friends matters more. Two, they decide that sex matters in their relationship. They discover that it contributes something unique and important and therefore they're motivated to collaborate to create the time and energy that it takes actually to do this silly thing that we humans do of rolling around like puppies and licking each other's bodies and putting parts of ourselves inside others. We could just be watching parks and recreation. That is also a fun way to spend 30 minutes. So why would we be having sex?

Because it matters. Not to say that they always prioritize it. Life gets in the way but because they feel it contributes something important it really matters. They're motivated to find their way back to each other. And the third characteristic of these couples is that they recognize that for some time they were following other people's rules about who they're to be as a sexual person, who their partner is supposed to be as a sexual person and who this relationship is, what this relationship is supposed to be as a sexual connection. And they realize they don't want to do that anymore. They want to understand who they are individually as a sexual person. They want to know for real who their partner is a sexual person and they want to find out what this authentic unique and totally individual unreplicable sexual connection truly is. That third one is not easy but oh is it worth it.

Aviva: No. But I love this idea of intentionally exploring what your own rules are. Break the rules, forget the rules, forget what you've been told. Let's figure out who we are individually, what we each want, who we are together and having fun and exploring and being curious sounds really powerful.

Emily: Four questions. The emotional floor plans is too big a thing. That's two giant chapters. Get the book but there's four questions to get you started. What is it that you want? When you want sex? It's not just orgasm. Most people can have an orgasm by themselves. What is it that

you want sex? And if you can't then there's whole books and workshops just about that. What is it that you want when you want sex with this partner? What is it that you don't want when you don't want sex with this partner? What is it that you like when you like sex with this partner? And what is it that you don't like when you don't like sex with this partner? Answer those questions individually. Share your answers with each other as you feel comfortable. And that alone will start a much more valuable intimate connected conversation than just why don't we have sex more often?

Aviva: Emily I have a question that I usually ask my guests at the end of every episode but I've had you on the show before and this is about if you could tell your younger self one thing what would you tell her and how old would she be? I want to ask you a different question if that's okay with you. Sure. If there's one thing that you came across when you were researching or one thing that you're thinking about these days, mulling over, that is just like fucking blowing your hair back about sex, sexual relationships, pleasure and you're just like that geeks me out to no end. And you could just shout it from the mountaintop like what is it?

Emily: So the most important thing that happened in my process of writing “Come As You Are” is that a friend of mine died two weeks before it was due. She died of cancer. She was right around my age, mid-forties, and she and her wife had gotten married just a couple of months after my husband and I got married. And here I am finishing this book about sex in long-term relationships being confronted in this really visceral way that we are not promised abundant time with the people we care about. We are only promised change. And that means that the way we navigate change together is what characterizes the fundamental nature of our relationship and the fundamental nature of our very lives. And so for me the most important thing I learned was that it's never going to be about have sex every day or you'll regret not having sex every day because sex every day is not available to me in the body that I currently have with perimenopause and long COVID and everything else. What's available to me is kindness and compassion and play and laughter and knowing that my partner cares about my body even with perimenopause and long COVID and all the rest of it.

And being able to imagine together the sex that we would be having if only I were well. So the quality of the ways we navigate those changes, that is the thing that blew the roof off of my head. So in my house what we do is we practice hope and we practice pleasure.

Aviva: That is incredibly powerful wisdom and I needed to hear that today too. So thank you. I think there's so much in the depth of appreciating each other and who we are and appreciating each other's bodies and spirits and personalities and uniqueness that gets so lost sometimes when we do just focus on what we want and need.

Emily: I spent a lot of the book reading all the ways that men and women complain on the internet that they hate each other and broke my heart. And if any couple of any combination reading the book can transition from having anger at each other to having anger at a system that lied to them about what sex is in long-term relationships and can become collaborators in breaking down those systems in their relationship so that they can play together to receive the pleasure that is the birthright of being born in a human body. I was going to say then I will have done enough but actually so if you're wondering did writing “Come Together” did your sex life the same thing that writing “Come As You Are” did? Yeah. A hundred percent months of nothing plus perimenopause plus long…

Aviva: I don't think people understand fully when they read a book. It's like Thanksgiving dinner. It's like Thanksgiving meal. It takes like 10 hours to make it.

Emily: And you're…

Aviva: Right in a minute. And I am just on the edge of signing a book contract about menopause which I'm very excited about but it's actually been four years since I turned in a book and it's going to be a year before that one's due. And it really is such I think for me I heard what you were saying about fear. I put so much expectation on myself for the book to communicate something that I go through a lot of internal…

Emily: There's a lot of lying on the floor crying…

Aviva: A lot of process around anxiety and is it good enough? Am I good enough? All the things.

Emily: But this time when I got to the end of it I had this a hundred thousand word TME of instruction on how to repair the damage I had just done. And really things are better for us now than they have been in all of our 13 and a half years. And if we were the only people who benefited from it if it were just because now I have the book I needed that alone would've been enough to make the book worth writing.

Aviva: That's what I'm doing with mine too. Well you asked earlier if there is a hormone that I could think of that actually centrally puts the brakes on desire I actually might put cortisol out there a little bit because I do think cortisol might actually get the crown for that one.

Emily: Yeah, stress. 80 to 90% of people. Well for some people it doesn't do anything. But for a significant chunk of people the stress response hits the brakes.

Aviva: Yes, for sure. Emily thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you get rested and replenished. And I know that your book is more than just for you and your partner and I'm going to be tapping into the book Fairy Genies who give you the book titles. No I have a good one too. And seriously though your work is amazing. You're incredible. Thank you so much for all that you bring. The expansive view, the cultural critique, the gender expansion that you bring in the acknowledgement of hetero relationships while breaking heteronormativity even in hetero relationships, the kindness, the compassion, and the deep reminder to put love and friendship first that above all else. Thank you. I am soothed by this today too in my marriage which is 40 years long.

Emily: Congratulations.

Aviva: Yes, thank you. And…

Emily: Do you still like each other?

Aviva: We do. Most days we do. I would say we would probably every day if we weren't always working together. It's the working together that we have different work styles and it brings up different pressures. And you know what I can say is my partner pretty much always likes me. I have to work on the kindness and the liking sometimes. And the menopause stuff hasn't fully helped that and the work. So I tend to bring the play and the curiosity and I am kind. But he is someone who always likes me and always wants my pleasure which is a really great gift that I sometimes forget. So thank you for the reminder. Everyone, Emily Nagoski and her books “Come As You Are” and “Come Together.” And she also has an incredible book that she wrote with her sister on burnout called “Burnout.” And her work is absolutely essential and page-turning reading. So it's like you can geek out on it and you'll still be page-turning and your partner can read it with you if you are partnered up. And if you're not, look, these are great books for learning more about yourself. Emily, thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you. A pleasure. It has been a pleasure pleasure pleasure. And thank you everyone for joining us. I'll see you next time.

The post Rediscovering Intimacy and Pleasure with Emily Nagoski appeared first on Aviva Romm, MD.